The Pessimist’s Optimist

Kevin Okoth: Beyond the Postcolony, 10 July 2025

Brutalism 
by Achille Mbembe, translated by Steven Corcoran.
Duke, 181 pp., £19.99, January 2024, 978 1 4780 2558 0
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... doesn’t pay enough attention to the spiritual dimension of human existence. As the theologian Vincent Lloyd put it, Mbembe sees popular religiosity as a site where ‘power relations are navigated or contested.’ Christianity wasn’t just the religion introduced by colonialism and adopted by African elites to discipline their subjects. In the hands of ...

My Darlings

Colm Tóibín: Drinking with Samuel Beckett, 5 April 2007

... Westland Row, hope to bump into no one between here and the bank, especially not Gerald Dawe or Vincent Browne, who both have offices there. Nothing against them really, but it’s mid-December, no time for meeting anyone. Pass by Sweney’s Chemist. Lemon soap. Viagra nowadays, Bloom would buy. Lemon Viagra. Mr Beamish the old bank manager gone now, gave ...

The European Coup

Perry Anderson, 17 December 2020

... the Nietzscheanism of Foucault and Deleuze, and the Kantianism of Ferry and Renaut), it glossed Vincent Descombes’s critique of the first two as vicious derivations of Kojève, and the rejection by Gauchet and others of the third as pious reversions to the thought-world of the Categorical Imperative. Overall, this was a body of thought that ‘invariably ...